Ecosystem flux simulation with SCOPE model

Author: Egor Prikaziuk (prikaziuk @ gmail.com). Presented 29 April 2021 Soil-Canopy-Observation of Photosynthesis and Energy fluxes (SCOPE) model is well-known in the remote sensing community for its radiative transfer and especially fluorescence simulations. Less attention was given to SCOPE “Photosynthesis and Energy fluxes” part and its performance is the topic of this talk. We compared SCOPE-simulated daily Gross Primary Productivity (GPP, Actot in SCOPE) and Evapotranspiration (ET, lEtot in SCOPE) to Drought-2018 eddy covariance flux product. SCOPE was constraint with leaf area index (LAI) retrieved from Sentinel-3 OLCI products and meteorological data from ERA5-land climate reanalysis dataset of European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). We evaluated different literature values of maximum Rubisco carboxylation capacity (Vcmax) and found out that very few of the published Vcmax values gave acceptable performance with SCOPE. Interestingly, the best performing case for annual sums of GPP was the default plant-functional type insensitive parametrization: Vcmax = 60 μmol m-2 s-1. Overall, SCOPE shows comparable performance with the well-known Boreal Ecosystems Productivity Simulator (BEPS) and Breathing Earth System Simulator (BESS) models. This study adds dynamic to the SCOPE model, validating it performance with the time series flux data. It can be convenient for researchers to operate with a single toolbox, the SCOPE model, for a comprehensive ecosystem analysis, parametrizing the study area directly from remote sensing measurements.